Reading the BBC news headlines on the internet one night last month, Graham Barnfield came across references to an academic blaming TV shows for the "happy slapping" craze. "My first thought was, here we go again," he says. "Yet another berk falling for the theory of copycat behaviour."

His second thought was rather less printable, as further reading revealed that Barnfield himself was the berk in question. At which point events raced out of control. Barnfield contacted the BBC to let them know he had never blamed TV for happy slapping (slapping someone in the face while someone else photographs them on a mobile phone). Hours later, the website changed its headline to "Don't ban slap-attack TV shows" - which Barnfield says he never said either.

Within a week, Barnfield had drifted into a surreal world. Not only were his views being misquoted in the British, New Zealand, South African, German and Indian media without a single journalist bothering to check for accuracy, he was also being misrepresented as an expert on happy slapping, a title he had never claimed for himself.

Barnfield is not some media ingenu; he is a lecturer in journalism at the University of East London. "I've learned a great deal about dealing with the media in the past few weeks," he says ruefully, while knocking back an espresso in the cafe on UEL's Docklands campus. "It's one thing to understand that most journalists don't trade in nuances; it's another to master the art of explaining a complicated idea without it getting reduced to a simplistic tabloid soundbite."

Anyone who had bothered to read any of Barnfield's published writings on the media would know that he distinguishes between the cognitive effects of television and film, where viewers absorb information, and the behavioural effects, where they allegedly copy scenes from the screen. "While the first undeniably exists," he says, "there is very little evidence for the second.

"Even back in the early 1990s, when I was writing for Living Marxism, I was campaigning for free speech and against kneejerk reaction. And in 1997, I organised a screening of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the ICA when the film was still banned."

And did anyone rush out of the theatre to slice someone up?

"Not as far as I know."

So how did Barnfield get turned over so badly? "A few years ago I wrote a chapter for a book on reality TV in which I argued that humiliation and entertainment had become entertainment," he says. "As a result, I was interviewed sometime later by the BBC about the similarities between Big Brother and the brutality photos taken by British and American troops in Iraq. The article also mentioned happy slaps, though I did not comment on this directly.

"Shortly afterwards, I was called by a researcher from ITV's Tonight With Trevor McDonald asking if I would contribute to a programme on the phenomenon of happy slapping. I agreed, and later found myself in a club on the King's Road in London being shown footage on a laptop of people being slapped. It became obvious they wanted to record me wincing at what I was viewing, but it was almost impossible as the laptop kept crashing and some of the incidents were clearly staged. By the time I left, I was quite nervous about how my views would be portrayed, as my two and a half hour interview was to be condensed into 90 seconds."

It was worse than he feared. Although Barnfield had never suggested a causal link between TV and happy slapping, the press release sent out the night before the programme was shown on May 12 claimed he had, and it was on this that the BBC and other media based their stories.

If Barnfield wasn't an expert on happy slapping when he first commented on the subject, he is now. "I though I'd better mug up if I was going to be quoted." But no one seems that interested in consulting him any more. "No one knows just how widespread the so-called craze is," he says. "Much of the footage seems to be either staged or endlessly repeated by being sent from one mobile phone to another. A happy slap doesn't appear very different from many other antisocial behaviours, so it's hard not to think there's more than a touch of a manufactured moral panic about the way it's being reported."

It's all a long way from the day job. But Barnfield is nothing if not adaptable, and his career is typical of the new breed of academic who takes his work where he finds it. He grew up in Leicester, where his dad worked as an engineer and his mother taught home economics. After taking A-levels, he worked for the old Department of Health and Social Services, processing dole applications by day and playing in a long-forgotten indie band by night.

When stardom failed to materialise in the Midlands, Barnfield headed for the south coast to take a degree in English and media studies, though he gives the impression of having spent most of his time busking as a freelance journalist and masterminding the overthrow of society as an active member of the Revolutionary Communist party. Which led him to working in a housing advice centre in Brighton on graduation.

Things looked up in 1992 when Sheffield Poly became Sheffield Hallam and Barnfield was offered one of the new university's first studentships to do a PhD on his real love, 1930s American culture. "There were huge changes in the arts and government involvement in the 1930s: there was a move away from the abstract to the documentary, as people tried to find a genre relevant to the Depression."

At night Barnfield worked as a bouncer at Sheffield City Hall. "There was a drive to professionalise the doorman business, and I was sent on both self-defence and cultural awareness courses. In one session, I was asked to say what I would do if I found a Somali chewing qat in the club, to which the only answer was 'write it up in a journal as it's so improbable'."

His two personas met just once. "The degree ceremony for my doctorate was held in Sheffield City Hall," he says, "and several of my colleagues were on duty as I went to collect my certificate. That performance earned me the nickname Dr Hannibal Leicester."

A love affair drove him south to London, where he tried to make a living as a freelance journalist and academic. "I picked up hourly lecturing jobs where I could," he says. "In one term, I left myself 90 minutes to travel between Twickenham and Watford to get to different lectures."

Barnfield briefly went into partnership with his brother, running a business-to-business internet company. "That all went belly up with 9/11," he says, "as a large part of our business plan was dependent on cold calling companies in the World Trade Centre." Barnfield decided to get serious about academia and was offered lectureships first at the Surrey Institute of Art & Design and most recently at UEL.

He was also awarded a fellowship from the Wolfsonian in Miami and since last September he has been on sabbatical, rewriting his PhD thesis into a book. In the past few weeks, he's had plenty of cause to rethink the historical perspective.

"Back in the 1930s, regardless of whether people agreed with the policies, people believed in the power of transformation," he says. "Now everyone just wants to micromanage." But what about Barnfield, himself. Is he not a living proof of transformation? "You mean from PhD to bouncer back to academic?" he asks. "I don't know about that. I said to my flatmate last week that I was amazed I had become an expert in antisocial behaviour. He took one look at the state of my room and replied 'I'm not'."

The CV

Name: Graham Barnfield

Age : 35

Job: Lecturer in journalism, University of East London. Before that, fractional lecturing contracts, bouncer, DHSS clerk

Awards : Fellowship at Wolfsonian FRU, Miami

Publications: Reality TV - How Real is Real and other academic papers; forthcoming book on the culture of 1930s America, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan